Back in 2012, I made a series of threads about the development of how many posts and threads were being made on VGChartz. Here's another iteration of those, with some added information about how the different subforums have developed too.
First off, the core of any forum - the amount of posts made.
As one can see quite easily from this, VGChartz activity dropped by two thirds from the peak in 2009 to the bottom in 2011. This was partly due to the generation ending, but mostly due to some bad decisions on the sideof the forum creators (if you want to read about that, check out the replies 2012 version of this thread; http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=145901&page=1 . TWroO's comments in particular explain it quite well)
Since then, the current generation of consoles launching boosted the amount of posts made up to the double, but it's slowly been decreasing since the middle of 2014, to the extent that activity is now down to the 2011 levels.
If we look at the amount of threads, we see a similar tendency.
We're now in the period of VGChartz history with the lowest amount of new threads, with an average of 36 threads per day from November 2015 to now.
The real question, of course, is what is driving this decline?
Back in 2012, our theory was that the explanation came from a sharp drop in Nintendo fans on the site, as the Wii started performing worse and worse. We didn't bother to check the data for it then, but I have now. And it's clearly wrong.
As you can see, the Nintendo section has always moved very similarly to VGChartz overall. The drop from 2009-2011 is slightly more severe, but it's really just a drop of slightly over 70% compared to the rest of the site's 66%.
Rather than look just at the Nintendo section compared to the site, we could look at the Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft sections, and try to figure out what drives activity.Is it sales? Is it anticipation?
The first thing to notice is that having higher sales clearly doesn't mean having more activity on VGChartz. Nintendo had consistently higher sales from 2009-2012 than what Sony did, but there was less activity in the Nintendo section. From 2013, though, Sony has had higher sales, but the Nintendo forum has increased heavily in popularity while the Sony forum has dropped.
Anticipation is possible, but doesn't fit with all the data. The Nintendo section bottomed out just before the Wii U released, and spiked roughly half a year after. On the other hand, the Sony forum saw heavy activity before the Ps4 launched, and dropped like a rock after it did. The Microsoft section followed a similar pattern as the Sony forum.
Of course, a problem with these kind of analyses is that Nintendo fans don't only post in the nintendo section, and the same with Sony fans and the sony section. The gaming section is the largest section, and obviously encompasses all kinds of gamers. The same goes for the sales section.
It's difficult to say what drives activity on VGChartz, but it definitely seems that the big three's subforums activity are inversely related to their sales. When Sony performs well, there's less activity than when they perform poorly.
Can you read something out of the data that I can't? What do you think drives VGChartz activity?
